Timekeepers. Simon Garfield

detail, and the time distortion we perceive has just happened in retrospect. The neuroscientist David Eagleman, who has conducted many experiments into time perception and as a boy experienced a similar elongation of time when he fell off a roof, explains it in terms of ‘a trick of the memory writing a story of a reality’. Our neural mechanisms are constantly attempting to calibrate the world around us into an accessible narrative in as little time as possible. Authors attempt to do the same, for what is fiction if not time repositioned, and what is history if not time in retrospect, events re-evaluated in our own time?

      Not that I could have explained this in the ambulance on the way to the hospital; the ambulance had its own routines and schedules. As did A & E, where I sat for what seemed like an eternity waiting to be seen. With my amygdalae returned to equilibrium, there was now a different sort of elongated time – the elongation of boredom, two hours or so looking at other patients and wondering how I would cancel most of my packed week ahead. Jake had planned to take the last train that evening to St Ives, but the train would leave without him. After a while my wife Justine arrived, and I took her through what happened, still with bloody paper stuck above my eye, and after a further while the process began properly, and I was on a gurney in a screened cubicle, a nurse seeing whether I could make a fist. It was almost midnight when they started putting my elbow in plaster to keep it from moving before they could operate on it, and past one by the time a kind doctor at the end of his shift said he had to get back to his wife and their three-week-old baby, but he would sew me up rather than let a junior do it because it was such a deep wound.

      And then at around 3 a.m. I was alone in the bowels of the Chelsea and Westminster. My wife and son had driven home with the bikes in the back of the car, and I didn’t yet have a bed in a ward so I lay in a darkened room in a speckled gown tied at the back, with my arm in plaster on my chest and nine stitches just above my eyebrow, and painkillers inside me. I wondered how long I would be there, and how long until they operated, and I could hear dripping somewhere and a person calling outside my room, and I began to feel cold.

      I thought I could feel every granule of time. It was August 2014, but the date seemed irrelevant and arbitrary. My over-wound mind had been prised open by a fall, and everything had been upended. In a dead space in a clinical setting I felt myself drifting towards a consciousness where time took on not only a new urgency, but also a new laxity. I was back in a cradle where time was no longer my own, and it made me question to what extent it ever had been. Was everything chance or was everything fixed? Had we lost control of something we had created? If we’d left the ground just a half-minute earlier, or pedalled just that bit harder, one wheel rotation more, or if the traffic lights by the Royal Albert Hall had slowed us down, and if the woman from Portugal had lingered over her cake that afternoon, or, even better, hadn’t come to London at all, then this would have never happened, and Jake would have caught his train, and I would have watched the highlights on Match of the Day, and the doctor would have arrived home earlier to help his wife. Everything that passed for time in this setting had been self-imposed and self-ordained, a modern arrangement calibrated gradually over generations. It made me wonder how such an alliance had come about. Time regulated transport, entertainment, sport, medical diagnostics, everything – and the people and processes that set these connections in motion are the subject of this book.

ii) The Shortness of Life and How to Live It

      Someone feeling sorry for themselves in a hospital ward today would do well to think of Seneca 2,000 years ago. On the Shortness of Life advised his readers to live life wisely, which is to say not frivolously. He looked around and didn’t like the way people were spending their time, the way ‘one man is possessed by an avarice that is insatiable, another by a toilsome devotion to tasks that are useless; one man is besotted with wine, another is paralyzed by sloth.’ Most existence, he reasoned, was not life, not living, ‘but merely time’. In his mid-60s, Seneca took his own life by slitting his wrists in the bath.

      The most famous line in Seneca’s essay comes right at the start, a reminder of a famous saying by the Greek physician Hippocrates: ‘Life is short, art is long.’ The exact meaning of this is still open to interpretation (he was probably not referring to the queues at the hot Richter show, but the length of time it takes to become an expert at something), and Seneca’s employment of the phrase confirms that the nature of time was a topic that thinkers in Ancient Greece and Rome found highly engaging. Around 350 bc, Aristotle saw time as a form of order rather than measure, an arrangement in which all things are related to each other. He saw the present not as fixed, but as a moving entity, a component of continuous change, ever dependent on the past and the future (and, idiosyncratically, the soul). Around ad 160 Marcus Aurelius believed in fluidity: ‘Time is a river of passing events and as strong as its current’ he found. ‘No sooner is a thing brought to sight than it is swept aside and another takes its place. This too will be swept away.’ Saint Augustine of Hippo, who lived a long life between 354 and 430, caught the fleeting essence of time that has confounded quantum physicists ever since: ‘What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.’

      My elbow was made in the summer of 1959, and it had been shattered on its 55th anniversary. The X-rays showed it now resembled a puzzle, with the bones of my joint chipped and scattered like fleeing prisoners. During my forthcoming operation, which I was assured would be fairly routine, the bits would have to be rounded up and held in place by pieces of wire.

      The watch I was wearing at the time of the accident was also made in the 1950s, and lost between four and ten minutes a day, depending on how often I wound it, and other things. I liked the fact that it was old (you can trust an old watch because it’s been doing the same thing for years). To be punctual at appointments I had to calculate exactly how late my watch may be. I had been meaning to take it in for recalibration, but I never seemed to have the time. Most of all I enjoyed the analogue factor, the cogs and springs and flywheels that didn’t need a battery. But what I really liked was the suggestion that time shouldn’t control how I conducted my life. Time could be the most destructive force, and if one could protect oneself from its ravages, one could somehow attain a sense of control, and a sense of directing one’s own destiny, at least on an hourly basis. The best thing of all, of course, the ultimate temporal freedom, would be to give my watch away, or to throw it from the window of a speeding train.

      Four minutes of time, fast or slow – that was a useful thing to consider when lying supine and semi-conscious in a dark room, drifting in a boat along the reeds, searching for the place, in a phrase Clive James once employed in a song, where you trade your shells for feathers. I admired the optimism of Aristotle: ‘We live in deeds, not years; in thoughts, not breaths; in feelings, not in figures on a dial. We should count time by heart throbs.’ I wanted a time holiday; I approved of J.B. Priestley’s dictum that a good holiday is one spent among people whose notions of time are vaguer than one’s own.

      They operated on me the next morning, and not long after lunchtime my mouth was dry and there was a surgeon standing over me and a nurse was measuring the throbs of my heart. The procedure had gone well, and I could expect to get about 90 per cent of my flexibility and pronation back within eight weeks if I worked hard at the physiotherapy.

      In between the physio I watched a lot more television than normal, and got far angrier than usual, and read a lot on my Kindle, normal books being unmanageable with just one good hand, as was watch-winding. I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, that inflated spiritual road trip by Robert M. Pirsig that became a phenomenal bestseller by tapping into some sort of Western cultural zeitgeist, or what the Swedes call a kulturbärer, an ultra-timely book that challenged our assumptions about cultural values. In this case, Zen challenged our assumptions that what we wanted was more and faster – more materialism, a faster and more connected life, a greater reliance on things beyond our control or understanding.

      Beneath the surface, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is all about time. It begins with the words ‘I can see by my watch, without taking my hand from the left grip of the cycle, that it is eight-thirty in the morning’, and for the next 400 pages the